The film is also hampered by generally stagey performances and visually uncinematic treatment by a clearly uninspired director evidently held back by the early sound cameras, which tend to sink it. In an unlikely turns of events, Haye’s Mrs Hillcrist finds Hornblower’s daughter Chloe (Phyllis Konstam) is a prostitute and blackmails Hornblower into stopping his lucrative schemes to buy up land, evict tenant farmers and fill the area with factories.Įven with a screenplay by Hitch himself and additional dialogue by his wife Alma Reville, the socially-conscious, improbable screenplay isn’t up to much at all, though there is an attempt to develop Galsworthy’s themes of class warfare and the urbanisation of the countryside. The rival families’ ensuing feud has disastrous results. The Master has difficulty summoning up sympathy in and involvement with his faded source material in John Galsworthy’s stage play about a fervent clash in an English village between an old-money, upper class family called the Hillcrists (C V France and Helen Haye as Mr and Mrs Hillcrist and Jill Esmond as their daughter Jill) and an upstart speculator called Hornblower (Edmund Gwenn) and his family ( John Longden, Phyllis Konstam and Frank Lawton). Produced by British International Pictures, The Skin Game (1931) is worth a little look but it is a mostly fairly tedious experience, and one of Alfred Hitchcock’s least interesting movies, probably just of interest for Hitchcock completists only. The Skin Game ** (1931, Edmund Gwenn, Jill Esmond, C V France, Helen Haye) – Classic Movie Review 2101
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